This is quite an embarrassing question, as i don't think anyone cares about this.

As a context : there are about 3-5% people in the world who cannot picture any image mentally (some of them never dreamt !). While you could think of it as a flaw, some of them perform very well on visual tasks, as graphic artists for example.

The last time i asked this question a writer, she answered me that every bit she wrote was crystal clear in her mind, with motion, vivid colors, etc.

I was wondering if it was a prerequisite to be a successful writer, or to at least be able to write at a good pace ?

Thanks.

I'm not quite in the 3-5% but I certainly never 'see' crystal clear images in my mind. I glimpse aspects of images among a shifting mix of associations and changing/connected forms.

When I write I think in terms of the words, the language, how it makes me feel - I'm not seeing a TV image in my head and trying to describe it to you - I'm trying to find the language that evokes what I'm thinking about, and what I'm thinking about isn't a picture - it's a complex, shifting mass of associations, sprinkled with flashes of different views and images.

Perhaps it's because my imagination is resident in the language - rather than an image that I then need language to translate - that people seem to like my prose...

Continuing the theme of sensory integration/experience and how it relates to writing and consuming writing: I can't listen to my audiobooks. It makes me uncomfortable. In general I find when I listen to writing read aloud, even by experts, it has far less impact on me than when I read it from the page. Highly emotional passages fall flat for me - excitement fails to build. Perhaps it's not being in charge of the pacing, not being able to linger or to race... but either way just as vision is not the core of my imagination - my ears are not the gateway to my reading soul.

I know the reverse is true for many people - they love audiobooks, a narrator brings to life a text that if they read it on the page might do little for them.

I know people who say (& I have no reason to doubt them) that, if I ask them to visualise a horse see a horse, where I see manes, fields, hooves, horseshoes, a muscular flank beneath a glossy hide ... nothing static, glimpses, flux.

My wonder is whether if you take a sub-group like, say, 'highly praised' writers, or writers 'known for their prose' or some such ... whether you would find more commonality in their sensory experience and the way it integrates with their writing, than in the larger group of 'anyone who writes' or just 'anyone'? Or whether they would be every bit as diverse as the population as a whole.

I have no idea.

... but if you think about it ... having a crystal clear mental image of say 'a tower' doesn't help you describe it any more than say ... a crystal clear photograph of a tower does. Unless your goal is an accurate mechanical accounting of the tower's features then a clear and singular image really has very little to do with the art of writing.

You might say that the tower stood, dark against the sky, defying the years with the arrogance of stone. You might say that the door opened onto a room cobwebbed with memory, where the shadows scuttled away into the corners as if frightened by the daylight... none of those words come to you from a photo perfect image - they come from an interlocked complexity of imagery and mood, presenting the feel of a place.

I'm pleased to present the full version of The Liar's Key cover for the UK, Voyager, edition. Also by Jason Chan. The US one is presented next, then both together with a poll so you can register your opinion. The art without the title/author is presented at the bottom.

Common-sense tells us that it's better to be reviewed on blogs than not to be. It's hard to sell a book that nobody is talking about.

The question is: in general do blogs review books that are already being driven forward by word-of-mouth, that vast off-line network of one friend to another, conversations around the water-cooler or lunch table? Or do blogs initiate and drive forward that larger conversation?

A gratuitous picture of a windsock.

So - how do we know? I mean, obviously the answer is 'a bit of both' but which end of that spectrum is it?

All I have to offer is anecdote, but it's anecdote coupled to some figures.

If you look at the List of Lists I made, showing the Best of 2014 lists that featured Prince of Fools a little clicking around will show that a lot of those lists also include three other titles:

I'm going by memory here, but I just clicked the first four links on the list and three of them featured Veil of the Deserters.

Bloggers, at least the ones that seem to like my work, love Jeff Salyards. The blog-o-sphere as a whole seemed to catch RJB fever for the last quarter of 2014, and certain high-traffic parts of the blogging world literally ripped themselves asunder in their orgasmic rapture over Mirror Empire.

So how did these books fare?

I'm pretty damn convinced that the number of Goodreads ratings a book gets correlate to sales. If you want to compare two books, then if they are from the same year and same genre the relative number of Goodreads ratings is a half-decent indicator of their relative sales.

Veil of the Deserters - 216 (since May)

City of Stairs - 3725 (since September)

Mirror Empire - 1189 (since August)

For comparison a fair number of popular fantasy books released in 2014 have around 10,000 ratings.

Kameron Hurley reported being pleased with her sales of Mirror Empire, 10,000 copies sold after 4 months is very good going. On the other hand we can see that all of that blog activity (and there was a LOT of it) didn't turn her into a best-seller overnight, or over 4 months.

The real interest for me here is Veil of the Deserters. I've read and enjoyed the book and spoken with Jeff online quite a bit. He readily acknowledges that the book and its predecessor (also lauded on many blogs) have not sold spectacularly.

One obvious reason that the books haven't sold in great numbers is that the publisher, Night Shade Books, collapsed during the release and had to be rescued by selling their titles to another publisher - in the meantime being unable to perform many of the fundamental tasks of a publisher, such as getting copies on shelves.

Random people excited to be drinking water.

This lack of visibility out in the real world obviously had an impact on those off-line word-of-mouth conversations so vital to selling books. We still had the on-line excitement over electronic copies supplied to blogs - but there was no corresponding drive in any of the other places where books get their boost from. This was a book that was really only seen by bloggers. Many of them loved it (as evidenced by its prominence in so many Best of 2014 list) and yet it seems to have sold only a fraction of the copies of some of its peers which got similar levels of love.

The conclusion then? Well, there's no firm conclusion. But as a single observation, gifted to us by a the combination of blogger love and publisher fail. It seems to push us some of the way toward the windsock theory. A blog-gasm alone cannot assure great sales.

Saturday, 7 March 2015

Over on my unofficial website (yeah, I have one of those now!) there's a flash fiction writing contest.

The prize is a rare (possibly unique) signed Advance Review Copy of The Liar's Key from Ace Books - but there's also feedback from a panel of authors if your piece of flash fiction wins (or some words from your particular judge if you're one of the pieces they put through to the final).

Friday, 6 March 2015

I'm hoping the bloggers will use #SelfPubFantasyBlogOff or #SPFBO tags to make it easier for everyone to find articles/reviews via Google.

The bloggers each have one of these now:

First let me say thank you to all the authors who sent their work in. You were so numerous I wasn't able to respond individually but at the end of this post is a list of all the entries I received, which blogger they went to, and whether they were in the 25 for that blogger that will definitely be considered (1-25), or in the excess that may be considered if the blogger is feeling extra energetic.

Almost everyone who sent in thanked me for taking the time to do this - of course I've spent only a modest amount of time on the project and it is the bloggers who are going to put in the real hours.

Almost everyone who sent in thanked me for the opportunity. And it is a great opportunity - but let's take a moment to keep expectations real here. We have over 250 entries. Each blogger is going to select the book they feel is best from the 25+ entries sent to them. That means that 96%+ of you will fail at the first hurdle. That's just the unforgiving mathematics of the thing.

You may have written a great book, but there may be one in that 25+ that the blogger likes better.

I sent Prince of Thorns to 4 agents. The first didn't reply. The second didn't reply. The third sent a cut&paste rejection. You're only getting one chance here.

The deadline for bloggers selecting their champion who they will 'publish' into the final round is September 1st. I will link their decisions and reviews here as and when they are made. If all 10 bloggers turn in their decisions early we will move into round 2 early.

Good luck everyone!

I must put in an extra word of thanks here for Sarah Chorn of Bookworm Blues who helped me refine the format.

By my count 80 of the 260 entries (31%) passed to the bloggers are from female authors - a slight underestimate no doubt as I assumed the owners of names like Alex and Andy to be male.